As well as genocide, Mladic is accused of crimes against humanity: persecutions on political, racial and religious grounds; extermination; murder; deportation; inhumane acts of forcible transfer; inhumane acts and murder. He is accused of violations of the laws or customs of war, murder, unlawfully inflicting terror upon civilians, cruel treatment; attacks on civilians and taking hostages (UN and military observers).

Mladic made his last public appearance at an international football match in March 2000. Two years after that, he was seen at a wedding at Valjevo in western Serbia and there were subsequent reports of him using a summer house nearby, at Pricevici. But from then on information about his whereabouts became progressively more vague and fanciful: He was on Mount Kosmaj, south of Belgrade. He had fled to Belarus. Or Russia. Or Kazakhstan.

In 2006, however, the part of the Serbian security apparatus that was genuinely searching for Mladic achieved a breakthrough when several people were rounded up and charged with aiding and abetting him, though they have not since been tried. A report at the time in the newspaper Politika said those arrests had enabled investigators to pinpoint seven addresses where the general had lived. All were in Belgrade.

One was on a hill overlooking the city. Another was in Banjica, near intelligence headquarters. But all the others were apartments in the vast complex of soulless tower blocks that make up Novi Beograd (New Belgrade). Three were on Yuri Gagarin Street, within a 250m radius of the flat where Radovan Karadzic, Mladic's political master, was living until his arrest.

Mladic proved more elusive than Karadzic. The general remains a hero to the majority of Serbs and was able to count on the passive or active connivance of a huge swath of the population.

Described by those who knew him as courageous, dauntingly stubborn, virtually humourless – and a skilful chess player – Mladic also respected the fugitive's first and golden rule: to remain inconspicuous. In 2010 his family filed a request for him to be legally declared dead.

By contrast, Karadzic, the exhibitionist politician, could not resist inventing a flamboyant new identity as a bearded New Age healer. His audacious reinvention came unstuck when he was seized on a bus in 2008.

With the arrests of Karadzic and now Mladic, Serbia will argue that the main obstacles to eventual membership of the European Union have been removed. Mladic's trial at the Hague is likely to be a protracted affair.

The tribunal in the Hague never reached a verdict in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president. Milosevic, the first of the three most wanted men from the Bosnian war, went on trial for war crimes in 2001. His ill health – he suffered from high blood pressure – as well as his delaying tactics dragged out proceedings until he died in 2006.

Karadzic is emulating Milosevic – the first head of state to be charged with war crimes – by adopting the same foot-dragging tactics. Mladic can be expected to follow suit.